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Strategic Candidate Entry and Congressional Elections in the Era of Fox News
Author(s) -
Arceneaux Kevin,
Dunaway Johanna,
Johnson Martin,
Vander Wielen Ryan J.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
american journal of political science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.347
H-Index - 170
eISSN - 1540-5907
pISSN - 0092-5853
DOI - 10.1111/ajps.12478
Subject(s) - competition (biology) , democracy , political science , vulnerability (computing) , quality (philosophy) , work (physics) , public relations , news media , public administration , political economy , politics , economics , law , computer security , computer science , engineering , mechanical engineering , ecology , philosophy , epistemology , biology
Elections are designed to give voters the ability to hold elected officials accountable for their actions. For this to work, voters must be presented with credible alternatives from which to choose. In the United States, as in other weak‐party systems, the decision to challenge an incumbent representative rests with individual, strategic‐minded politicians who carefully weigh the available information. We investigate the role that one source of information—partisan media—plays in shaping electoral competition. We hypothesize that the haphazard expansion of the conservative Fox News Channel in the decade after its 1996 launch influenced congressional elections by affecting the decision calculus of high‐quality potential candidates. Using congressional district‐level data on the local availability of Fox News, we find that Fox News altered Republican potential candidates' perceptions about the vulnerability of Democratic incumbents, thereby changing their entry patterns.